Hillary Clinton, the die-hard candidate of white America?

Stephen F. writes:

Is this a first? The presumably defeated Hillary is actually saying she’s a better candidate because WHITE VOTERS prefer her (she perhaps unintentionally characterizes the whites who support her as “hard working,” in contrast to…?):

The story is in USA Today:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters—including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Clinton’s blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.

If Hillary is staying in the race even against such odds, I wish her success, as being far more acceptable than McCain or Obama. And if she won, on the basis of her appeal to working class whites, it would be difficult for her to turn around and do a McCain on open borders. The fact is, despite her standard Democratic position in favor of amnesty, she does not express the kind of fanaticism for open borders and the transformation of America that is common among the Republican and “conservative” elite. I think it’s because, as a promoter of the nanny state, she does actually care more about the well-being of her fellow Americans than about spreading some universalist ideology.

- end of initial entry -

Ken Hechtman writes from Canada:

This isn’t just a first. It’s previously unimaginable.

Hillary is the wife and political heir of the self-described “first black president,” the first president whose cabinet “looked like America.”

Nobody imagined back in 1992 that she’d end up running a more racially polarized campaign than George “segregation forever” Wallace.

Think I’m making that last one up? Thirty years ago, George Wallace could still get 25 percent of the black vote. This week, Hillary couldn’t manage more than seven percent.

And I’m never willing to believe that a Clinton says or implies anything unintentional. They’re too calculating and disciplined for that.

I’m convinced the unspoken half of her sentence is “UNLIKE those lazy, shiftless, drug-dealing, welfare-collecting Negroes.” And I’m equally convinced she knew it would be heard that way and meant for it to be heard that way.

David H. from Oregon writes:

In a comment thread at Amren I ran across the remark, “I am openly white.” I think this is a clever remark.

Ken Hechtman continues:

You don’t even have to go back to 1992.

Hillary started the primary season with most of the civil rights old guard in her corner. The black vote was hers to lose at the beginning and she lost it at the beginning with lines like “If you’re young and hip and don’t have social needs, then Obama can be your imaginary cool black friend.” [LA replies: Is that a quote?]

Obama didn’t start off expecting to win 93 percent of the black vote. He also didn’t start off expecting to need it. Give him credit for this: He did not begin the campaign trying to be Jesse Jackson. But that’s where he is now. He cannot now afford to disappoint even a small fraction of black voters, not in the general election campaign and not in government.

LA replies:

Ken Hechtman’s point seems to be that the Democratic party became racially polarized in a way no one imagined could happen.

But didn’t it happen as a result of the Clintons’ and their supporters’ bizarre statements attacking Obama racially? I mean, WHAT was William Clinton’s intent in comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson? To suggest that Obama was nothing but a black candidate? And I still don’t know what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said—and kept repeating it—that Obama was where he was only because he was black. On the face of it, these were stunningly demeaning statements coming from liberal Democrats about a black candidate. So that’s where the polarization came from. And it hurt Hillary, it turned off lots of Democrats on her. So what was that all about?

Ken Hechtman replies:

Hillary’s polarization very nearly worked. There are two reasons why it didn’t and before the fact I wouldn’t have bet heavily on the first or bet at all on the second,

1. Obama went out and registered millions of young and/or educated new Democrat voters. These are people that have been called “post-white.”

They’re immune to Hillary’s race-based appeal in a way that a critical mass of the Democratic Party of 2006 would not have been. They’re even immune to the Jeremiah Wright rhetoric. In their minds when Wright says “white America,” he’s not talking about them, he’s talking about their grandparents. So Hillary’s best effort was only able to get the white vote to break 2-1 in her favor, no more than that.

I always smile and nod whenever a left-of-center politician claims his constituency is the millions of disaffected people who don’t bother to vote and he’s going to sign them up. They all say that, but none of them can do it. Obama went and did it on a scale nobody ever saw before.

2. Even so, losing two thirds of the white vote could have finished Obama off. It would have too, if he hadn’t managed to unify the black vote behind him to a degree nobody else in history has ever been able to do.

Ken Hechtman writes:

It’s a reconstruction-from-memory. Here’s the precise quote:

Still, a combination of sympathy and sisterly solidarity is unlikely to be enough to carry Clinton to the nomination. In her victory speech, she said that she had at last found her voice. More prosaically, she has at least found a better message, speaking less about herself and her experience and more about the voters. She is staking out policy ground slightly to the left of Obama on domestic issues, and noticeably won the votes of those on lower incomes and without college degrees. In the words of that Clinton adviser: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”

Emily B. writes:

I haven’t emailed in a long time as I gave birth to my fifth child, a daughter, six weeks ago. Anyways, I wanted to comment on Hillary and Mr. Hechtman’s take.

I disagree with his assertion that the black vote was Hillary’s to lose. I think he is thinking of polls. But as it got closer to the beginning of the primaries, the polls dramatically changed showing blacks leaving Hillary and going to Obama. Once the primaries started, blacks voted strongly for Obama, and then in South Carolina they overwhelmingly went for Obama and stayed that way. His increase of black support from South Carolina onward was pointed to as the effect of the racial polarization that the Clintons had caused, but in reality the increase was not large, as Obama already had so much of the black vote that by that point he was facing the law of diminishing returns.

In short, he went from getting 80 something percent of the black vote in the beginning to getting in the low 90’s of black support at the rancorous end. This disproves the notion that the black vote had been hers and she lost it through her racial polarization. From pre-voting polls to the present, there was a clear trajectory of black support firming up for Obama.

You must see the poll at mystery pollster of South Carolina to believe it. [See link below.]

Clinton’s campaign did bring up race, though, and it was offensive first to yuppie whites and later to blacks, and here is where the quote comes in. The first two contests were in very white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. She had gotten beaten handily in Iowa and New Hampshire was around the corner with those massive crowds of white people fainting and crying as though at a Baptist Revival. That is when an advisor, I don’t know who, said, “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.” This person vented what Steve Sailer and other conservatives were saying at the time about the phenomenon that was being reported 24/7. When black voting did start in South Carolina and went overwhelmingly for Obama, Bill Clinton upset blacks by dismissing his victory as saying that Jesse Jackson had won there too. It was reported that he was insulting because by saying this he was saying it was just a black victory. True, but also nobody likes their candidate to be dismissed or insulted. This is why ALL supporters of a particular candidate in any election feel worse towards any opponent as an election wears on. The only good opponent is the one who doesn’t fight and quits early!

For the quote, scroll down to the sixth paragraph of this article.

This shows the trajectory in polls for South Carolina for over a year. The flip begins in late November, early December. The Iowa Caucus, where the first vote was cast marking the beginning of the season, took place on January 3, 2008.

P.S. “Flips” like this, a sudden reversal, are not uncommon. The very thing happened with McCain and Giuliani. Moderates had Giuliani as their man and flipped for McCain. I can’t remember if it took place before Iowa or as a result of Iowa and before New Hampshire.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Emily has got the timeline right.

New Hampshire was January 8. The Guardian interview was done January 9, appearing January 10. The first indicator of a problem was January 15 when Hillary took just 30 percent of the black vote in Michigan running against nobody.

South Carolina where Obama got 78 percent of the black vote was January 26, Bill Clinton’s “Jesse Jackson” comment was the same day.

Geraldine Ferraro’s interview wasn’t until March 7.

Emily’s also right that I was thinking of the pre-Iowa and New Hampshire polls. But I was also thinking of Hillary’s early endorsements. She had Andrew Young, John L Lewis, Jacqueline Jackson, Alcee Hastings, Robert Ford, Darrell Jackson—pretty much all the survivors of Martin Luther King’s inner circle. And those last two are South Carolina players, they helped deliver the state to John Edwards in 2004.

There was also the chatter on the black Democrat blogs. I didn’t follow it myself but I got it second-hand from people who did. Before Iowa and New Hampshire, black Democrats didn’t take Obama seriously, didn’t think he could win enough white votes to be anything but the next Jesse Jackson.

Ken H. continues:

So I agree with Emily that Hillary had a non-trivial problem even before she started shooting her mouth off. I’ll concede that. I didn’t see it before looking at the timeline. I see it now.

But it wasn’t the worst such problem in the history of the Democratic party until she made it so.

Emily writes:

I want to think the pollster is still anonymous, at least he was when he came to my attention a couple years ago, revealing only that he was a Democratic pollster, or had worked as one. His is another invaluable site for discussing politics not only because of the sheer volume of data, but because he will show polling going back very far, so that trends are clearly discernible.

The most insightful thing I learned from that site this season is that during primaries, two candidates who share the same ideology rise and fall in tandem. In other words, when moderate McCain did well, Giuliani also did well, and both at the conservatives’ expense. It did no good for a moderate to try to win at a conservative’s expense as that was not his primary threat. Remember, that “flip” in South Carolina of Democratic voters? That is exactly how the flip looked between McCain and Giuliani. To us at the time (and Dems in South Carolina), it didn’t happened so suddenly, but put into perspective of over a year’s worth of polling, it clearly is dramatic.

LA replies:

How could McCain and Giuliani flip (switch places), if they rise and fall together?

Emily replies:

My apologies for being unable to convey my thoughts clearly tonight. BTW, Mystery Pollster is no longer a mystery. In fact, the site is now pollster.com and he clearly states he is Mark Blumenthal. That tells you how long that site has been in my bookmarks and how seldom I visit. Anyway, I went to the site to try to find one of the Republican primary state’s polling graphs to illustrate what I was trying to say, but was unable to find one. Throughout the polling period of the entire year of 2007 McCain and Giuliani rose and fell in tandem as did Romney and Huckabee. The trend lines for the conservative pairing and the moderate pairing had an inverse relationship with each other. So, these graphs were not only good at telling us how individuals were doing, but were also informing us about the contest between conservatism and liberalism (I do not mean to infer that conservatism was shown to lose, there was too much vote splitting among conservatives.) Now to your question. Giuliani was always on top in his pairing (as Romney was in his pairing), but the moderates had a change of heart as we all know and swapped Giuliani for McCain, thus they switched positions in their pairing. The conservatives’ trend lines were completely unaffected by this swap showing just how much the race was based on ideology. Really, the swap ended the pairing because once that flip took place, Giuliani was over, as he quickly sank out of sight showing a coalescing around McCain. As a conservative looking at those graphs with their trend lines back then, I screamed at the Huckabee line in my head, “Sink, sink!” Stubbornly, it did not. The data clearly showed that the combined conservative votes of Huckabee and Romney, not even counting the other conservatives, would have been more than plenty to have beaten the moderate victor.

P.S. The Thompson trend line was so funny; it was a huge arc conveying, “flash in the pan”.

Paul Nachman writes:

I thought Geraldine Ferraro was saying what I’d been saying, and I admired her for it: A white guy running on an identical record (equally negligible) to Obama’s wouldn’t have received the slightest attention.

LA replies:

Ok, let’s say that that was Ferraro’s meaning. Obama was not qualified to be president. Only his race had got him where he was.

Now she said this in March, after Obama had beaten Hillary in many states and was on his way to the nomination. He was already close to being the presumptive nominee. For Ferraro, a member of a party that is strictly organized according to racial/gender quotas (every committee and body within the Democratic National Committee is done by quotas), a party whose most loyal and important constituency is blacks, a party that totally endorses racial preferences, for her to declare that Obama was successful, not because of his abilities but because of his race, was (even if Mr. Nachman agrees with the statement substantively) the equivalent of throwing a bomb into her own party. It was a shocking and destructive thing to do. Also pointless. Did Ferraro think her comment would start a discussion among Democrats saying, “Yes, Obama, who is such a good speaker and has created this phenomenon within the Democratic party and has gotten more donations than any candidate in history, really has no abilities and is only successful because of his race and therefore we should reject him and choose Hillary.” It’s not just that Democrats wouldn’t say that because it was un-PC. They wouldn’t say it because they didn’t believe it was true. They saw Obama as effective, capable candidate.

There are plenty of blacks who are where they are solely because of race. I don’t think you can say that that is true of Obama. I had a discussion about this a month or two ago, in which I finally persuaded a critic that Obama was not without abilities—at least abilities as a candidate.

Emily B. writes:

I laughed out loud at Ken Hechtman’s response. I don’t like the Clintons, but am interested in making people aware of what is true, especially when someone is being maligned. This meme, that it was malevolence on their part that lost them the black vote, has been propagated by the far left and their cohorts in the media. I can only assume that it is because they find the truth unpleasant: blacks are simply voting for one of their own. The thing is, I believe the way blacks are voting is natural as they are a small group, about 12-13 percent of the population. The Mormons did this, too. In the Utah Republican caucus, they went for Romney by 94 percent! They defended themselves by saying their numbers for Bush had been similar, but there is a big difference between voting for a conservative over a liberal in the general and voting en masse for one conservative amongst other conservatives in a primary.

Also, I agree with Mr. Hechtman in the end: blacks wanted to vote for Obama all along, but only began to back him when they felt confident he had a chance. My one little quibble was when he brought up Michigan. Michigan voters, as we know, were told that their Democratic primary wouldn’t count. They could, if they wanted, cast a meaningless vote for Clinton, Gravel, or uncommited (something like that). One can’t discern much from Michigan’s results.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2008 12:53 PM | Send